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Stew's Writing Written For Love

SLEEVE NOTES FOR LEAN LEFT’S 2012 ALBUM, LIVE AT CAFÉ OTO

By Stewart Lee in Lean Left Sleevenotes Posted on Sunday, January 1st, 2012

I first saw The Ex in November 1986, in a pub in Oxford, before Andy Moor joined Terrie Ex on guitar.
I liked noise. But The Ex’s noise was about something, a crafted and constructed sequence of intense moments and sustained power; and there were spaces for the band to surprise themselves. On the way home, I felt like I’d been thoroughly told off, and I resolved to be a better person. This lasted for a day or so, but as a generation of listeners grew conditioned to the rock reflex, and driven into the stormy seas of free jazz and free improvisation, so it seemed The Ex did to, and my tastes, for one, have expanded under the band members’ ongoing influences.

Ken Vandermark is the perfect player to defeat the prejudices of free jazz skeptics. The Chicago saxophonist looks like a US Marines drill sergeant on his day off, here to do a Job Of Work. Vandermark does not play as of involved in namby-pamby philosophical negotiations with abstract ideas of transcendence. He has targets to meet and will achieve them by whatever means are most effective on that particular date. I imagine he’d call men Sir and women Ma’am, and I don’t want to know any different.

As we left a Peter Brotzmann performance at Café Oto last February, my wife told me Paal Nilssen-Love’s closing drum freak-out was the single most amazing performance she had ever seen in her life. As she did so, a man butted in for an autograph because I am a mid-table British comedian. The moment immediately compromised, my wife railed at me about how our relationship could not survive such rare epiphanies being consistently spoiled by these apparently unavoidable interruptions, and I had to spend the night at a service station off the M25. Nilssen-Love’s was the drum solo that nearly cost me my marrage. And that’s jazz!

Historically and musically, Lean Left squares the circle, two different approaches to the same end result meeting head on, accommodating without compromising, learning, and driving each other forward to excesses of profound absurdity. I was at the first of the shows documented here.
Jazz theorizing be damned. It was like being eighteen again.

Written by Stewart Lee in Lean Left Sleevenotes on 1st January 2012. Filed Under: Stew's Writing, Written For Love
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